Nightfall Protocol

Chapter 10:I'm Being Framed

The man's name was Danny. Danny Crews. He'd pointed northeast with a trembling hand, toward the intersection two blocks up where he'd last seen his brothers before the screaming had scattered them in three different directions. His parents he had no lead on yet. One problem at a time.

Andrew had told him to stay put, stay low, and stay quiet. Danny had nodded with the obedience of someone who had completely run out of better ideas.

Before leaving the station steps Andrew had swept the perimeter of the building out of habit, and that was when he'd found it. Lying against the base of the exterior wall beside the emergency exit, half obscured by a toppled waste bin — an M4 carbine, department issue, fully loaded with one spare magazine rubber-banded to the stock. Someone had dropped it in a hurry or been taken before they could retrieve it. Either story was grim. Andrew didn't dwell on it. He checked the chamber, confirmed the safety, and slung it over his shoulder alongside the carry bag.

The night had just marginally shifted in his favour.

He moved northeast at a controlled jog, keeping to the building edges, the M4 held low and ready. The fog had thinned slightly on this block, which meant better visibility in both directions — his and theirs. He took the first turn Danny had described and stopped.

Noise. Running, scrambling, the scrape of boots on concrete and underneath it the now unmistakable sound of the dead doing what the dead apparently did now.

He followed it to the mouth of a narrow connecting alley and took in the scene without breaking stride.

Two young men — late teens, similar builds, had to be Marcus and Joel — had their backs against a rusted metal door at the alley's dead end. Three zombies between them and any exit. The brothers were fighting with nothing but their feet and whatever adrenaline was keeping rational thought from shutting them down entirely. One had already lost a shoe in the chaos. The other had a bleeding gash across his forearm that Andrew clocked immediately with a surge of professional dread before confirming — sleeve torn, not skin broken. Scraped, not bitten. Margin of survival intact.

"Down!" Andrew barked.

Both brothers dropped without hesitation, flattening against the door.

Andrew raised the M4 and fired three controlled bursts.

Three targets. Three results. The alley went quiet so abruptly it felt like a sound in itself.

He lowered the weapon and walked toward them through the settling echo. "Marcus and Joel Crews?"

The taller one stared at him from the ground. "Yeah. Yeah, that's us. You a cop?"

"Andrew Callahan. Your brother Danny sent me. Can you walk?"

Both nodded, pulling themselves upright with the shaky coordination of people running entirely on fumes. Joel — the younger one by the look of him — kept staring at Andrew with an expression that sat somewhere between relief and something more complicated. Andrew filed it away and focused on moving them out of the alley.

They made it back to the main street without contact, the three of them moving quickly and low. The station came back into view and Danny materialised from the alcove at a dead run, colliding with his brothers in a collision of grabbed arms and exhaled names that Andrew gave them exactly four seconds to have before cutting it short.

"We need to keep moving. Reunions later."

They pulled apart, nodding, wiping faces. It was Joel who spoke next. He'd been glancing at Andrew sideways since the alley and apparently had decided that moving through a zombie-infested street in the dark was as good a moment as any to address whatever was sitting behind his eyes.

"You're Andrew Callahan," Joel said. Not a question.

"Already established that."

"No, I mean —" Joel hesitated, exchanging a brief look with Marcus. "We saw you on TV. Before everything went bad tonight. There was a news broadcast." He paused again, choosing words with visible care. "They're saying you were involved in the outbreak. That you and some others — they didn't name everyone — that you're part of the reason this started. They called you a suspect."

Andrew stopped walking.

The fog moved around them in the silence.

"They showed your badge number and everything," Marcus added quietly, with the tone of someone who wasn't sure whether delivering that information to the armed man beside him was wise but felt it needed saying regardless. "It was on every channel."

Andrew stared straight ahead down the empty street.

Someone had put his face on television. Someone had built a story before the bodies were even cold — or before they'd decided to stop being cold, as it turned out. That took preparation. That took time. That took someone who had known exactly what was coming before it arrived.

His grip on the M4 tightened slowly.

"Keep moving," he said.